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Dr Ruth Howard and Dr Gary Law, School of Psychology, were recently shortlisted for the final of the Enterprising Birmingham Innovation Competition 2015 award. The nomination recognises their exciting partnership with Warburton's and the development of the second 'Gut Feelings' film to support parents of children and young people living with coeliac disease.

Doctoral Researcher Ewa Stefanska, together with Professor Anthony Beech and Daz Bishopp, has published a paper in the Journal of Criminal Justice which explores offence pathways of non-serial sexual killers, with a focus on whether the pathways of those with a previous conviction for rape or attempted rape differed from those who had no such convictions.

Episodic memory is the time machinery that allows us to mentally travel back in time in order to relive past experiences, often in great sensory detail. These memories are highly associative and very information rich, but how are these memories coded in human brains?

Motor learning is a fundamental process which influences many aspects of our lives; from learning to walk in childhood to the rehabilitation process following an illness or injury. Despite the impact to society, it has proved extremely difficult to develop interventions that significantly enhance human motor learning in health or disease. Recent work from the Galea lab suggests that reward- and punishment-based feedback have positive but dissociable effects on motor learning.

In a new study published by Nature Neuroscience, Birmingham Research Fellow Joseph G﻿alea and colleagues, show that reward- and punishment-based feedback (winning money based on task success vs. losing money based on task failure) have both positive, but dissociable, effects on motor learning and memory; while punishment led to faster learning, reward caused greater memory retention.